She'd been thinking about the kitchen garden since March, and in April she started on it in earnest, which meant mornings outside in the cold with Caleb bundled and set in the dirt nearby, alternating between intense interest in the dirt itself, and vigorous attempts to eat it, while she turned soil and set the early seeds, and thought about what had been here before she came, and what she wanted to be here by fall. The neighbor woman, Clara Fen, came by in April for the first time since November. Clara Fen was not a bad woman. She was a woman who operated within her community's expectations the way most people operated within them.
Not cruel, not with specific intent to harm, but along the path of least resistance, which in November had meant a certain coolness toward Evelyn that followed the Hargrove campaign. She arrived now with a covered dish in a slightly overbright manner that Evelyn recognized as a woman making amends without quite saying so. She received her at the kitchen door and invited her in and set out coffee and did not make anything of the November coolness because she'd meant what she'd said to Cecilia Hargrove. She didn't forgive quickly, but she understood the difference between people who acted from malice and people who acted from the pressure of their circumstances.
And Clara Fen was firmly in the second category. Clara looked around the kitchen. She looked at the order of it, the warmth, the evidence of a household that was being genuinely managed. And she looked at Caleb on the floor investigating a wooden block with total seriousness.
"He's grown," she said. "They do," Evelyn said. "He looks well." Clara wrapped her hands around the coffee cup.
"You both do. You and Nathan. We're getting there." Clara was quiet for a moment.
Then she said with the particular awkwardness of someone making the shortest possible version of an apology. I heard the Hargroves withdrew the petition in February. I'm glad to hear it. She said it to the coffee cup.
Things were There was a lot being said in November and I don't think everything that was said was fair. No, Evelyn agreed. It wasn't. Clara looked up.
She'd expected something more forgiving, maybe or something colder, and Evelyn had given her neither, just the plain truth, and she held it for a moment. "No," she said. "You're right." She drank the coffee.
For what it's worth, Mrs. Aldridge thinks differently about it now. She mentioned it to me last week. Said she thought you'd been treated poorly. That's kind of her.
People come around, Clara said. It just takes them time. When something's unfamiliar, they go with what they know instead of what they're seeing. And sometimes what they know is wrong.